NYPD Red

Chapter 42

The Chameleon slept for three hours.

When he woke up, Lexi was in the kitchen.

“What’s for breakfast?” he called out.

“It’s too late for breakfast!” she yelled back. “We’re having brunch. Pancakes. The real kind, not the frozen crap. And I went out and bought fresh raspberries. We can afford them now.”

He padded to the kitchen, still naked. “What do you mean ‘we can afford them now’?”

“I counted the money. There was forty-five thousand dollars. Can you believe he was going to give it all to a drug dealer? I hate drugs. I don’t understand why people do them.”

“You sure it was forty-five thousand?” he asked.

“Three bundles of Benjamins worth fifteen thousand each. I counted it twice. Pancakes in five minutes.”

He showered, slowly turning the water from warm to hot to excruciating. The remorse was overwhelming. He had killed two, maybe three people yesterday, and he would happily kill them all over again today without batting an eye.

But Jimmy Fitzhugh was different. Jimmy was one of the good guys.

Please don’t shoot. I got two kids.

I know, I know. Tracy and Jim Jr. But what was I supposed to do once Lexi blurted out my name? I had no choice.

Bullshit, Gabe-she didn’t pull the trigger. You did.

He edged the water up even hotter. The pain helped.

I’m sorry, Jimmy. Really sorry.

The pancakes were excellent-real butter, fresh fat raspberries, thick Vermont maple syrup-and so was the steaming hot coffee. If he had needed a domestic scene in his movie, this could have been it.

“You sure I yelled out your name?” she said. “I swear, if I did, I didn’t even know it.”

“You said, ‘Gabe, hurry up.’ That’s all it took.”

“Fitzhugh should have pretended not to hear me. If he’d ignored it, you’d have thought he didn’t hear what I said, and you wouldn’t have killed him. It’s just as much his fault that he got shot as mine.”

“No,” Gabe said. “Bottom line, it’s my fault. I’m the director, I’m the producer-I put too much pressure on you. It was too big a part. We didn’t rehearse. I shouldn’t have put you on the hook for such a big role.”

“It’ll never happen again,” Lexi said. “I promise.”

“Just to be on the safe side, I think you should stay behind the scenes for a while.”

“I’m fired from the production?”

“No. No. Just the opposite. I really want you to be my coproducer. We’ve got a new scene or two to write. I need you now more than ever.”

“What new scene?”

“I’m not sure yet, but we netted forty-five thousand, and we only need thirty, so I thought maybe we could come up with a couple of cool new scenes and buy some more of Mickey’s pyrotechnics. We have fifteen thousand dollars to play with.”

“Fourteen thousand, nine hundred and ninety-four,” Lexi said. “The raspberries cost six bucks.”